Goo Goo Dolls, playing Sands Center tonight, took new record one song at a time

April 21, 2013|By John J. Moser, Of The Morning Call

For the first nine albums of its career, the Goo Goo Dolls followed pretty much the same recording pattern: When the band felt it was time for a new album, "you'd sort of like lock yourself in a bunker and make the record happen. Don't walk out until you've got 12 songs," bassist Robby Takac says.

That system seemed to work pretty well: Since its commercial peak with its 1998 triple-platinum album "Dizzy Up The Girl" — with hits "Iris," "Slide," "Broadway" and "Black Balloon" — the Goo Goo Dolls has had three albums that all went Top 10 and had at least one song (and up to three) that charted likewise.

But the process also meant lapses of four years between each of those discs.

With its newest disc, the upcoming "Magnetic," band decided to take a different approach, and tackled a new album one song at a time.

Fans will get to hear how the new approach worked tonight when Goo Goo Dolls play Sands Bethlehem Event Center.

During the show, Takac says, Goo Goo Dolls will play five or six songs (just the third date on the tour, the band is still working out the set list).

"The process was a lot different this time," says Takac, on the phone Saturday from Portland, Maine, when the band would play the second show of its tour last night. "We went through, we did one, maybe two songs at a time. So we didn't really feel like we had this huge pile of songs sitting on top of use like we did in the past. So it was fun – it was cool."

For the past year, Takac and his wife have been busy with a new baby daughter – "like every father, I was like, she's the most unbelievable thing I've ever seen in my life," he says – so much of the songwriting fell to singer John Rzeznik, who co-wrote much of the disc with producer Gregg Wattenberg in New York.

Takac says that after a couple of darker records, such as the last disc, 2008's "Something for the Rest of Us," Rzeznik made an effort to write more uplifting songs for the new disc.

"Then we all got together, went trough the songs, jammed a lot of it, and then recorded them," Takac says.

The band's old approach, Takac says, usually would end up burying the band "under a big pile of songs. What usually ended up happening was that the record would take us like a full year to make because we'd be underneath all these things that needed to be finished all at the same time.

"It was always like we'd have 12 songs musically recorded and we'd have 10 of those have like half the lyrics. And with Pro-tools, all of a sudden your options are just endless musically. You start getting into this weird, sort of swirling, second-guessing yourself.

"We you do a song at a time, you really don't have a chance to do that. You know, you're done. We did some tweaks along the way, but in general, we'd move on to the next idea once one was finished. I think it sort of alleviated some of the pressure and allowed us to work a little bit more quickly.

"I think what we found when things were focused on just one at a time was that you could sort of finish your song, clear your head and move onto the next thing. So I think that's why we were able to finish it so much quicker this time."

Takac notes that "Magnetic" is the band's 10th album, "which is pretty crazy to me. We've been putting out records for a long time and 10 albums is sort of a benchmark. You have a body of work at that point."

Billboard magazine last fall compiled statistics that showed Goo Goo Dolls have had more Top 10 songs than any other artist on the Adult Contemporary chart in the past decade, and "Iris" was No. 1 over that time.

"That's crazy, huh?" Takac says. "I can't say anything other than just that I'm so unbelievably thankful that whatever the chemistry to allow the band to stay together and still make music, I'm just so glad that it's still there. I don't know – I'm amazed. I'm amazed and I'm happy."

Takac remembered that the band's last show in Bethlehem was last August at Musikfest, when the band shared the stage with George Dennehy, the Virginia teen born without arms who became an Internet sensation using his feet to play Goo Goo Dolls songs on the guitar.

Takac says Goo Goo Dolls drummer Mike Malinin struck up a friendship with Dennehy, with whom he occasionally keeps in contact and apparently is working on a record of his own.

"It was awesome, man," Takac says. "It was fun. It was a lot of fun."

He says that just as the Goo Goo Dolls' success and the new record have made him happy, "I can't wait to get out there and start making the fans happy."

The irony with the new record is that, despite its quicker turnaround, its release has now been done for months and was scheduled to be released May 7, but has been pushed back to June 11 by the record company.

Asked why, Takac laughs. "I'm not really sure. We've already done a bunch of TV for it and stuff but it's probably something in the back office. We couldn't really get a straight answer."

That means the tour will be nearly two months old before the record comes out, leaving fans hearing the songs for the first time at the shows.

"The reaction was pretty good after one night," Takac says with a laugh.